For my business blog most of the hashtags are #leadership or #motivation.
For this blog, most of the hashtags are either #blogging or #socialmedia (remember, never add spaces on a hashtag). It seems that not only do a lot of people specifically look for certain hashtags, but many of them have lists they’ve created so they can follow their favorite people on those topics. Hashtags are a big deal when you’re trying to show yourself as an authority on certain things. There’s a reason for having multiple hashtags, which I’ll get to later on. You add the tags after the link, more than one but less than four, adding a space after each one. You’re going to want to add hashtags to your links, especially for Twitter. You can do it the longer way and just copy the post title and the link, but there’s more you’re going to want to do after that… which I’ll get to next. As it pertains to your social share buttons, hopefully you’ve remembered to put your Twitter handle in so you’ll know where people are sharing because they visited your blog as opposed to sharing because they saw it on Twitter. The easiest way to capture the information you need after you select your articles to share is to use the social share buttons on your post (you’re using them right?) for Twitter and copy it into something like Notepad. For this blog it was blogging and social media for my business blog it was leadership. The next thing I did for both this blog and my business blog was start with 15 to 20 posts that I thought highlighted myself best on the topics I initially wanted to be known for. As far as I’m concerned, other than the ability to change background colors, Tweeten is the way to go. There are lots of clients that people use to connect with Twitter. I used to use Tweetdeck when it was a standalone platform, but once it got integrated with Twitter & had to be in a browser I changed over to Tweeten, which I’m going to have to write about one of these days. I decided to talk about the process I go through and why I do it this way. I also talked about scheduling posts but didn’t say how I was doing it or where I was getting my stuff from. Twitter is my #2 referrer for that site there you go! Back then, a lot of my increase might have been due to the marketing I was doing for my 2nd book Leadership Is/Isn’t Easy. However, for my business website, traffic had gone up 200%, or 3 times the level it had been before right now it’s pretty much leveled out.
To be fair, that same progress hasn’t happened with my business blog, where traffic has actually come down, even though I’ve had lots of people adding me to lists on Twitter. Twitter is now my 4th largest referrer overall but my #1 referrer from social media that’s pretty cool right? I can tell you that, in a comparison of the period I compared to after my initial test that my traffic has gone up 35% that’s not so bad. At that time I mentioned that my traffic had gone up 15%. I mentioned how things had been progressing for me, and a lot of it had to do with Twitter. That’s because I know I need more traffic coming to my blogs and website, and I wanted more people to recognize me as someone who might know something about blogging, social media, leadership, etc. In that post I talked about how I was doing a lot of things to try to get myself noticed more. In March of 2015 I wrote an article titled Promoting Yourself In Social Media My Personal Study.